Marie Curie award goes to Turkish academic

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Marie Curie Actions, a research fellowship program that awards a set of mobility research grant schemes funding pre and post-doctoral researchers in Europe, has picked Turkish academic Özgür Demirtaş’s proposal to fight the EU economic crisis as one of seven projects that deserve the support of 100,000 euros, among one million contenders.

Özgür Demirtaş, a finance professor at Sabancı University, suggested in his project that capital entrance to companies via the stock exchange could end the economic crisis in the European Union (EU).

Demirtaş claims that EU members need to draw foreign investment to their countries in order to overcome the crisis, while investors are avoiding investing in the EU because of the economic crisis and prefer developing countries’ markets. He will research every publicly traded company in each EU member state and compare them with developing countries’ indexes this year.

The main goal of the project is to determine which companies in the EU deserve to take
investments and which do not, in order to avoid labeling all EU companies as “not investable.” The research aims to separate strong firms from weak ones in EU countries.

Demirtaş said that his project would selectively contribute to cash flow, adding that both EU members and countries that have a considerable trade volume with the EU would benefit from the project’s results.